Vietnam

Red = CycleGreen=Train/Bus

Vietnam is without question my favorite of all the places I've ever visited. I've visited 14 countries and 23
U.S. states, and it's my favorite of all of them. It took me a while to figure out why, and the reasons are
many and complex. The most compelling is that the Vietnamese people are the friendliest, most welcoming and
most outgoing people I've ever met. This is also the first place I've done any serious biking (1,800 km or
1,100 miles), so maybe I was on an endorphin rush the whole time. There is a lot of history here for someone
of my generation, and lots of interesting things to see. I met a lot of people that I liked. They were both
Vietnamese and others that came from all over the world and somehow ended up in this small country off in the
corner of Southeast Asia.

Like every country, Vietnam has both a light side and a dark side, although the light side far outshines
the dark. Both make for a very interesting and enlightening visit. In this narrative, I'll try to give my
impressions of what I saw and experienced here, both good and bad, and let you draw your own conclusions. In
short though, I highly recommend Vietnam as a travel destination for anyone.

You can learn some facts about Vietnam from the CIA
World FactBook, Britannica or Encarta.
Vietnam is about 3% of the size of the U.S. or 80% the size of California. It's longer and narrower than
California, so the distance from Hanoi to Saigon is about the same as the distance from Oregon to Mexico. In
latitude, it extends roughly from the level of Mexico City to Nicaragua. This gives it a fairly wide climate
variation, but generally warmer than the U.S. Vietnam's population is 30% of the U.S. population, giving it a
population density about eight times the U.S. or roughly double that of France. It's population is about 2 1/2
times that of California, so the population density is about triple that of California.

No discussion of Vietnam by an American would be complete without some mention of the protracted war
between the two countries, which lasted almost 30 years. Over here, it's called The American War. This
makes perfect sense for two reasons. The first is that Vietnam War wouldn't be very specific, since
there have been wars in Vietnam off and on for thousands of years. The second is that the war was entirely
driven by American objectives. Vietnam was never any kind of threat to America in any way. I have a lot to say
about the war, and I think there's a lot to learn about how the world works by studying it. However, I don't
want this narrative to turn into a big discussion of the war, because that's not what the bulk of the visit
was all about, and it was over 25 years ago anyway. So, I will say most of what I have to say in a separate
page which you can read or skip as you choose.

Terminology and Currency

The local currency is the Dong. It's abbreviated VND, and there are roughly 15,000 VND per USD (U.S.
Dollar). Like Egypt, Vietnam has abandoned coins altogether, and all money is paper. The smallest note is 500
VND (.03 USD). When I got back to Thailand and had some coins given to me, it suddenly hit me that I like the
paper money only system and I'd like to see all coins abolished. Coins are a pain in the neck, and it doesn't
really become apparent how much of a pain they are until you don't have to deal with them for a while.
Australian coins are the worst, with a half dollar being roughly the same size and weight as a brick.

The name Ho Chi Minh comes up a lot in any discussion of Vietnam. He is widely considered one of the most
influential communist leaders of the 20th century. He was the president and chief architect of the communist
strategy that ultimately beat both the French and the Americans. His name is usually abbreviated to HCM.

The term expat is short for expatriot. Technically, it means someone that has imigrated to a country
from somewhere else. I'll use it in that context, but I'll also use it to mean people that are long time
visitors but not permanent residents, since it's hard to tell them from permanent residents.

The former capital of South Vietnam was named Saigon for about 100 years. The name was changed to Ho Chi
Minh City (HCMC) in 1975 when the communists took over. I started out calling it Ho Chi Minh City, but most of
the time nobody knew what I was talking about. This was partly because the word "City" is an English
word, and the Vietnamese name is different, and partly because if I called it "Ho Chi Minh" for
short, they wouldn't really connect that with a destination. When I actually learned the Vietnamese word for
"city", nobody ever recognized what I was saying, partly because my pronunciation was so bad, and
partly because nobody actually believed anyone would ride such a funny looking contraption that far. After a
while, I started calling it Saigon, and instantly everyone did know what I was talking about. It turns out
that the new name doesn't seem to have stuck all that well. Most people I met still call it Saigon, at least
when when talking to foreigners. I picked up the habit of using Saigon, and for the remainder of this
document, I'll call it Saigon or HCMC depending on the whim of the moment. This is not intended as any
disrespect for Ho Chi Minh, but simply bowing to local custom (I suspect Ho Chi Minh would have objected to
the name change anyway). Besides that, Saigon is easier to type.

Itinerary

In the map shown above, you can see my trip in a series of lines. The green lines represent places where I
took a train or bus. The red line shows the places where I biked. I spent about three weeks in Hanoi before
the start of the trip, and made a side trip to Ha Long Bay as well. The cycling part of the trip took 13 days
of cycling, plus several rest/sightseeing days for a total of 22 days. The official part of the bike tour is
1100 km (685 miles), or about the same as riding from Redding to San Diego. I added a bunch of distance around
Hanoi and Saigon for a total of 1,800 km (1100 miles) inside of Vietnam. At the end of the trip, I spent about
six weeks in Saigon, and for a while there appeared some danger I'd never leave. All told, I spent 3 months in
Vietnam.

The cycling part of the trip was a supported ride from Sena
Tours, which I would call a cycling/culinary tour. This is a small touring company owned by Marcel
Hendricks. The tour was absolutely fabulous, and I'd highly recommend Marcel's company for anyone wishing
to do bike touring, and of course I recommend bike touring for everyone. He does tours in lots of different
parts of the world, including Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Bolivia. Marcel is a strong cyclist that once
spent four consecutive years cycling around the world. He now lives in northern Thailand, and operates his
company from there, cycling about 13,000 km (8,000 Miles) per year.

The tour was absolutely spot on (have to use my new Aussie vocabulary while I can). We stayed in very good
hotels in every town, and had three excellent meals every day. It's a supported ride, so there was a bus that
could hold all the cyclists and all the bikes. The bus was used for sightseeing trips, as well as support for
any bikes that broke down, or any riders that wanted to rest for a bit (if your ego could stand it... mine
couldn't). Our local guide Leah rode with the bus, and arranged all the meals,
hotels and local guides for the sightseeing tours. She tried to have every meal include something we hadn't
had before. Marcel rode with the group. The tour cost is very reasonable, and the price includes all hotel
charges, meals, the bus, the driver, Marcel and Leah. His trip in Thailand is even less expensive because
Marcel lives there and has his own bus. All in all, it's a good bargain, and Marcel and Leah run a very good
show.

This particular trip had a smaller group of cyclists than usual. There were just two couples from Belgium,
plus me. All of the others are much stronger cyclists than I am at this point, so I got the distinction of
being the slow one. Here's the bike gang on a river boat going to see Phang Nha Cave, which is the
biggest cave in Asia.

Motivation

A lot of people have asked over the years: "Why Vietnam?". I say "over the years",
because I've been talking about visiting here off and on for 15 years. I've always had trouble answering that
question succinctly.

Part of the answer is that I just wanted to see a country smaller than California that could kick our
ass in a war. There's only been one war that the U.S. lost decisively, and that was in Vietnam. The
Vietnamese won a war against the biggest, best armed and best financed military machine in the world.
This was one of the most costly blunders in recent history, and it had profound effects on the balance
of power in the world, as well as on a lot of social areas in the U.S. and other places. It was a huge
blunder both in the motivation (our reasons for fighting were bad), and in implementation. This has been
a subject of study for quite a while, because it's a very good example of how world political dynamics,
historical forces, short sighted politicians, and clueless leaders can lead a nation into a bad
situation. This was something America should never have been involved with, and the results were
predictably bad.

So, being reasonably well aware of the history leading up to the war, and at least some of the
subsequent results, I wanted to see the place and the people. I'll talk a bit more about the war later.

Even though this was what piqued my interest, there's a modern Vietnamese saying that should be kept in
mind: "It's not a war, it's a country." My original interest in the country was because of the
war and my general interest in history, but that's not what's most interesting about the place today.

Another reason I wanted to come here is that I've read that lots of westerners who came here over the
last hundred years fell in love with the place. I could never get a good sense of why that was from
their narratives, so I thought I'd go and see for myself. I think I have a good idea now, but probably
won't be any better at conveying it than the other writers were.

I also just wanted to see Southeast Asia in general. I want to see China, Japan, Korea and some other
places around here as well. In fact, my interest originally started with China and only gradually
changed to Vietnam. Except for Mexico, everywhere I've visited before has been essentially a first world
county like Canada or Western Europe. Those were interesting, but in a lot of ways that's like visiting
Kansas. Europeans and Canadians just aren't all that different from Americans. Asian cultures are quite
a bit different from Western cultures, and there's no way to even begin to understand the differences
without spending some time there. I still don't pretend to understand them, but I'm a tiny bit closer.

The fourth, and maybe the primary reason was that I decided I wanted to visit the place 15 years ago,
and once I've made an arbitrary goal it's hard to let go of it <g>

Hanoi

First Impressions

I really enjoyed Hanoi, and it's even harder to define why I liked it than Bangkok was. On the surface, it
appears to be a run-down, crowded, dirty, noisy, busy and strange city. It looks like when the Viet Minh
kicked the French out in 1954, the French took all the paint with them and it was never replaced. It takes a
bit of time to really get a feel for Hanoi, and come to appreciate it's charms. In the end, I was quite happy
that I spent enough time there to get to know the place. After one or two days, I would have come away with a
negative impression, but after a week I had a very positive impression. I'll try to go through the impressions
as they came to me, and maybe you can get a sense of the place from that.

My first night in Hanoi was a mixed bag of messages, but my overall impression was completely favorable.
Customs was easy and efficient. I'd been led by the guidebooks to expect a hassle there, but it turned out to
be as easy as everywhere else I've been. They did make me open my bike box to be sure there was in fact a bike
inside, but that was it. I got a cab for the trip into the city, and the traffic seemed to be like a cross
between Cairo and Bangkok. The horns are back in full force, but the accepted use of them is different than it
is in Egypt. The mix of vehicles is considerably different from either place. There are LOTS more bicycles
than I've seen anywhere else I've been, and there are lots of moto-bikes. By moto-bike, I mean the ubiquitous
bikes I mentioned on the Thailand page. They look like a scooter, but have big wheels like a motorcycle. Most
are 50-110 cc, and 110 cc is the limit unless you have a special permit. Cars aren't exactly rare, but they
aren't crowding every block either. I rode in on a highway where about 60% of the traffic was cars and trucks.
Within the city, the ratio seems to be more bikes and moto-bikes, and less cars. The driving style appeared to
be quite chaotic, and somewhat intimidating. Since I'd already seen Cairo and Bangkok, it wasn't shocking, but
it was different. All in all, I was inclined to have a favorable initial impression, partly because I just
assume any place with a lot of bikes can't be all bad.

After checking into the hotel, my impressions went back down again. Walking out of the hotel put me
smack-dab in the middle of a large collection of touts and hustlers. It felt like being back at the pyramids
again, except that my fuse was already shorter than it was when I started out. This naturally pissed me off,
and my impression went back down. I however persevered, and tried walking for a few km around the city. It
turns out that there is just a constant low-level aggravation in all third world countries, consisting of
people trying to sell you something. I've never gotten away from it when on foot in Vietnam, Thailand or
Egypt, and don't expect to get away from it in any other area frequented by tourists. The most annoying are
the transportation providers. In Bangkok, it was the Tuk-Tuk and Moto-Bike drivers, and in Vietnam it's both
the Cyclo drivers and the Moto-bike drivers. If you get away from the tourist areas,
it gets a bit better but it's always there. I did learn how to wave these guys off quickly and efficiently, so
at this point they're still annoying but not all that bad. As for the pack of buzzards at the front of the
hotel, they got to know me after a couple of days and left me alone, at least for the first block. Now I
should point out that Etienne says he's had good results with these guys by giving them a smile and a polite
"No Thank You". That's certainly a more friendly technique than mine, so you should try it out.

Wandering around Hanoi at night, the major impression is one of darkness. The energy consumption per person
in Vietnam is less than 1% of what it is in the U.S., and about 2% of what it is in France. One of the results
is a very low number of street lights. I didn't feel unsafe walking around in the dark, but it was definitely
a dark experience. A typical block will have 1-3 street lights at most. It's also a pretty quiet town at
night. There isn't a lot of action on the streets, and most of the bars and clubs appeared to be closed or at
least mostly empty.

The most amusing thing that happened that first night was running into a drunk Australian businessman. We
had a ten minute conversation that didn't even come close to making any sense. It was amusing though, and
somewhat symbolic of the whole experience. He would go on and directly contradict himself twice in the same
sentence. That was a good start, because lots of things in Vietnam seem to work out that way, and talking to a
drunk Ozzie was good training for my first night in Australia.

Second Impressions

The next day, I walked about 10 km (6 miles) observing the place, and my impressions shifted from mildly
positive to distinctly negative. First off, I couldn't walk more than a minute or two without having to shake
off a couple of touts trying to sell me something. The offered commodity was mostly transportation, but it
somewhat regularly veers off to drugs or women. It seemed almost as bad as Egypt, and distinctly worse than
Bangkok. The other thing that contributed to the bad impression was that everywhere I looked, the place showed
signs of absolute poverty. Almost nothing was painted or well repaired, and most of the places I looked
appeared to be dirty, grimy and run-down.

Now I should point out that I walked the same places a few days later, and my impressions got better. The
better impressions were because I got a bit better at observation, and noticed that the places were not as
dirty as I originally thought. This place is desperately short of money so the buildings are run-down
unpainted and unrepaired, but the people keep each area as clean as it seems to be possible with what they
have. I found that if I wandered by a typical place and just glanced at it, all I'd see is that it looked
dirty. After looking closer, I'd see that the common area was swept clean, and kept clean. The furniture was
old and worn, but well taken care of. Lots of little things like that added up to making my impression be one
of people that are poor, but not lazy or uncaring. I distinctly got the impression that they are doing the
best that they can with what they have, and after I stayed around for a while, I could start to see the areas
where the overall level of prosperity seems to be swinging upward.

Third Impressions

During the course of the next few days, I wandered around the city for about 10 km each day. Gradually, I
started to notice the one thing that really stands out about visiting Vietnam. I didn't quite realize it at
the time, but in retrospect this is the time when I really started to love the place.

The thing that really stands out about Vietnam is that the people are very friendly. I will without
any qualifications say that on average, the Vietnamese people are the most friendly, outgoing and welcoming
people I've ever met. Since I've traveled well over 1,000 miles of road on a bicycle, and spent three months
here, I think I can speak with a tiny bit of authority. Everywhere I go, people go out of their way to smile
and say "Hello". At first, I was a bit suspicious that they were saying hello to my wallet, and a
fair number of the foreigners I met here firmly believe that. I have since decided that that is not usually
the case. They're just very friendly people, and they seem to treat all visitors that way. This is despite the
fact that I can't speak more than a few words of Vietnamese, and most of the time people don't understand
those few words. Of course, the persistent touts are still a constant source of annoyance, and in Saigon lots
of the people were definitely saying Hello to my wallet, but on the whole this is balanced out by the
reactions from the rest of the people. I've done some rough back of the napkin calculations to quantify this.
So far, I've had what I would consider to be distinctly unwelcoming responses from exactly 11 people. On the
other side of the coin, I've received a smile and a "Hello" or a few questions about me or the bike
from well over 5,000 people. It's hard to argue with a ratio like that. I've also had a lot of people try to
extract money from me, but I've had many more people that just wanted to talk and be friendly for a few
minutes. In Egypt, exactly 100% of the people I interacted with were trying to get money from me. Here the
ratio is much better.

I attract a lot of attention here, even when I'm not cheating by using the recumbent bike. Just
walking around attracts a lot of attention, and pulling out a guidebook, map or laptop increases the attention
dramatically, especially in places like Hanoi or any of the towns in the interior where tourists aren't very
common. Naturally, some of it is from touts, but I've pretty much learned to disregard them by now. The rest
is just from people that are curious and friendly. During a typical day on foot, I'd say "Hello" to
one or two people every few minutes. The people I talk to will be anything from kids of three or four years
old, right up to adults and seniors. Most of the places I've been, people are either trying to hustle me for
money, or completely ignoring me. Here, it just doesn't work out that way, or if they are hustling me they
aren't doing a very good job of it.

Part of this is because tourism is relatively new here. From the fall of Saigon in 1975 up until the mid
90s, Vietnam had practically no tourism at all. This is mostly because of exceedingly stupid blunders made by
the communist government, which proved itself to be almost as bone-headed as the American government. Now
tourism is on the rise, and it's one of Vietnam's major sources of hard currency, but the typical Vietnamese
everywhere except Saigon hasn't seen enough tourists to become jaded yet. I'm sure they will be eventually,
since tourists even annoy me and I'm one of them<g>

Travel Tip

As soon as you travel anywhere interesting, you'll run into the age old money conversion issue. If
you can do multiplication and division in your head, you're good to go. If not, you may find these
suggestions helpful. A lot of these are old Indian tricks my father taught me back in the days before
there were calculators (yes, I'm that old). If you find any particular suggestion confusing, just
move on to the next one.

Find out the conversion rate, round the number off and memorize it. By round it, I mean don't
pay any attention to the exact number, but instead remember the nearest number that's easy to
do math with. For example, Vietnam has 14,480 VND per Dollar, so I just rounded it to 15,000.
Egypt has 3.8 Pounds per dollar, so I used 4.

If you're in a place like Vietnam or Italy that has had tremendous inflation in the past,
figure out a way to disregard the thousands at the end or maybe even ten thousand. For
example, Vietnam's rate is 15,000 VND per dollar, so I just decided to chop off ten thousand
before I even think about it. Once you think of 10,000 VND as the basic unit of measure, you'll
see that each 10,000 VND is about $.66. If you just think of a 10,000 VND note as as a dollar,
you'll be close enough for most things.

Memorize the inverse of the conversion rate (1 divided by the rate). For example, 1 USD is
15,000 VND or 1.5 - 10,000 VND notes. The inverse of 1.5 is .66. Any time you need to do
division, you can multiply by the inverse instead, and multiplication is usually easier to do.
For example, say something costs 100,000 VND. You could divide by 15,000 to get the dollar
equivalent, but it's much easier to think of the 100,000 VND as ten 10,000 VND notes, and
multiply the ten by .66 instead. That gives you 6.60 USD.

As soon as you get to your destination, or even before you get there make a couple of
conversion charts. These tend to be even easier to use than doing the math. Use a spreadsheet
or calculator to figure out the value in your local currency for every size bill or coin that
you're likely to use. For example, in Vietnam I made a chart that showed the USD equivalent for
1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, 20000, 50000 and 100000 VND and wrote it on the back of my guidebook
with a pen. If I'd planned better, I would have made a spreadsheet before I left and taped it
on. I also made a chart showing the VND equivalent for $.50, $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and so on.
Most of the time, I could then just take a price and look up the rough equivalent on the chart.
I might have to add some numbers, but it's always easier to do addition than multiplication or
division. For example, if the price is 150,000 VND, it's much easier to add the values for
100,000 and 50,000 than to do the multiplication or division.

You can carry a calculator with you if you want to look like a dork, and you think you'll
actually have it when you need it (fat chance).

If you're traveling somewhere where your money goes a long way, don't worry about an exact
number. It's not like a buck or two is going to make a huge difference to your budget. On the
same vein, don't bargain someone to death. I've seen tourists spend five minutes trying to get
the price down by $.50 or walk away from something they want over a dollar. This seems like a
complete waste of two people's time to me. The tourist doesn't have anything else to do, but
the merchant certainly does. This doesn't mean you should encourage people to cheat tourists
outrageously... just that you need a bit of perspective. Nobody in a third world country is
getting rich off of you.

Go to an ATM in the airport and get enough money for a couple of days at least. You'll need
cab fare and tips almost immediately, and nearly every international airport in the world has
at least one ATM.

For countries with ATM access, it's usually the fastest and easiest way to get money, and it
usually but not always gives you the best exchange rate as well. Don't assume you'll be able to
find an ATM though. In Bangkok, I tripped over them all the time, but in Hanoi they were hard
to find, and in central Vietnam they are very rare. In the same vein, don't overly depend on
traveler's checks. Only about 1/4 of the hotels I stayed out could handle them, and those were
the high end hotels.

Before you arrive, look in the guidebook and memorize the amount in the local currency that's
appropriate for a tip. As a general rule, one U.S. Dollar is usually good for most small
things, and in somewhere like Vietnam it's usually pretty generous. You can also do a
percentage tip like in the U.S. without going too far wrong. Unless you're a cheapskate, you're
almost certain to want to tip someone before you quite surround the money situation. When in
doubt, round up. It won't kill you.

When you leave a country, find out if there is an airport tax, and keep out that much money in
the local currency, plus enough for some coffee or a snack. Then change the rest of the local
money you have for currency for the next destination. When I left Vietnam, I found that I
couldn't change the VND I had left over anywhere outside of Vietnam.

While we're on the subject, here are a couple of safety tips for dealing with money:

Don't keep all your money and credit cards in one place, no matter how secure that place is.
Always keep at least one credit card and a bit of cash as a backup in your luggage, or a
different wallet so if you lose your primary you won't be hosed.

Always carry a wallet or purse with a small amount of local currency. If you get held up, just
give the guy the danged thing and move on. If you get pick-pocketed, it won't be the end of the
world. I generally just keep a few days spending money in my normal wallet.

Try to keep a couple of bucks in lose cash or coins in your pocket. The less you dip into your
wallet, the better. It's never a good idea to flash a big wad of cash.

Try to keep your wallet somewhere that's difficult to pickpocket. Front pockets are better
than back pockets, but not invulnerable. If it's winter, a jacket pocket with a zipper is very
good. I had five attempts on my wallet in one evening during Tet, but they didn't manage to
check my inside jacket pocket. Velcro closures, zippers or buttons are easy to add to any pair
of pants or shorts. These also aren't invulnerable, but they're an improvement.

Lots of people carry money and stuff in hidden pouches under their clothes. This is a good
idea, although it's a bit of a pain.

Make two photocopies of your credit cards, passport, driver's license, plane tickets, receipts
for traveler's checks, prescriptions for glasses and any drugs you take regularly. Carry one
copy in your luggage separate from the money, and leave one copy with someone at home so if you
lose the originals, you can recover quickly. Make sure the copies are good enough to Fax. In
many cases (such as your passport), this means use a decent copy machine and expand the size
upwards. 120% usually makes something about the right size. When in doubt go bigger, because
you're quite likely to find a really old crappy fax machine when you need the copy.

If you carry a backup stash (US 20's or 100's work well), make sure they're in immaculate
condition. If they're torn, worn or discolored in any way there's a good chance you
won't be able to use them when you need them.

Vietnam Traffic

During my first few days in Hanoi I put my bike together, and observed the traffic. I noticed that the
vehicle mix is considerably different from what it is anywhere else I've been. If I stand on the corner
outside and count for one minute, I'd see maybe 50 moto-bikes, 20-30 bicycles, 4-5 cars, and 5 cyclos. In a
lot of ways, the traffic appears even more chaotic than in Cairo. There's a lot more diversity of vehicles,
both in size and speed. In Cairo the rules were chaotic, but the vast majority of the vehicles were either
cars or busses. This means there's a lot more happening in any particular stretch of street in Vietnam. The
traffic rules appear to be quite flexible. There are very few stop-lights, so intersections seem to be a
complete bonzai experience.

As an outside observer, it appears to be very dangerous and probably is. I saw surprisingly few accidents
during my trip, and only one of those was serious, but I've heard of high accident rates that I couldn't
verify. One thing that's not obvious unless you think about it is that even though things look very chaotic
and hectic, a very fast rider will be going around 30-40 kph (20-25 MPH), and most of the riders in the cities
are going less than 20 kph most of the time. In fact, after three months in Vietnam, I found traveling at 60
kph (40 mph) in Bangkok to seem frightening. In western countries, it's quite common to spend hours every day
traveling in much bigger vehicles, much closer together and much faster. A typical California freeway
generally travels at around 110 kph (70 MPH). American drivers have just a few milliseconds to respond to
trouble, and the consequences of failure are much bigger.

Naturally, once I thought I understood the traffic, I just got on the bike and started riding it. It was a
bit scary at first, since I really only had a total of about 6 hours on the bike before I tackled Hanoi
traffic, and I wasn't entirely sure I could handle it in a bad situation. It's sort of like deciding you need
to learn to swim, so you go down to the deep end of the pool. Then you decide that isn't sufficiently
motivating to promote proper learning, so you tie on a few bricks. It was a bit nerve wracking, but in the end
it all worked out with no problem. I've only had a few close calls during my entire trip in Vietnam, and every
one of those would have been a close call or a crash on a diamond frame bike.

I can definitively tell you though, that the first time you hit one of those bonzai intersections, it's
quite an experience. It's similar to the intersection I described in Bangkok, but worse. In Bangkok, the very
busy intersections generally require each car to stop, and then kind of crawl through the intersection. In
Vietnam, everyone goes through as fast as they can, while dodging and weaving around the other vehicles. Even
for an old hand like I am now, it can be a bit intimidating at times. The other difference is that the sheer
number of vehicles in an intersection in Vietnam can be much higher than it was in Bangkok, and people tend to
slow down a lot less. In Bangkok, a large percentage of the traffic is cars and Tuk-Tuks. In Vietnam, the vast
majority is bicycles and moto-bikes. This means a busy intersection can have a lot more individual vehicles
than a similar intersection in Thailand.

Now with the experience of the last thousand miles and six weeks in Saigon (which is even more bonzai than
the rest of Vietnam), I can tell you a bit about how traffic works here:

Every driver is responsible for what's in front of them. Vietnamese drivers basically never look behind
them, or very far to the side either. The driver in front has the right of way, and anyone behind him
has to yield. This means for example that if someone is half a bike length in front of you and does a
dodge and weave, it's your responsibility to miss them. Anyone behind you is responsible for dodging
you. If a Vietnamese driver is pulling into a road, they look for a hole in front of them and just
barrel into it, assuming anyone coming behind will either slow down or dodge.

Most traffic rules are somewhat loose. This chart shows the rough
translation for some common traffic signs:

One Way

We'd like a fairly high percentage of you guys to be going this way, and if you
aren't going that way try to stay over more or less on the right side of the road, if it's
convenient.

Do Not Enter

If you enter here, be aware that there will probably be vehicles coming at you
that you'll have to dodge. You'll probably want to keep towards the right side of the road.

Lane Marker

You might want to consider staying within this lane if you're a foreigner. It
won't do you any good because the locals won't, but it might make you feel better. (Bikes and
scooters wander all over the street, and the cars and trucks just dodge around them. At any
given time, any lane appears to be OK for either direction, based on the conditions of the
moment.)

Red Light

When you guys get around to it, you might consider stopping. That is of course
presuming someone else wants to go through in the opposite direction. It would obviously be
stupid to stop stop when there's nobody else trying to use this intersection.

Green Light

OK, it's your turn to go but don't get too wild about it since the guys responding
to the stop sign will probably take a while to get around to stopping.

Orange Light

We're short on either red or yellow lights. Look at the position of the light and
figure it out from there. Note the same rule applies for blue lights on the bottom.

No Light

Either the light is broken, temporarily or permanently; or it's in the middle of a
very slow flashing yellow cycle. In any case, just quit whining and go through.

Now, this doesn't mean that chaos rules. It just means that the system is
different, and you have to understand how it works to fit within it. For example, even though the stop
light rules are fairly loose, most people do stop for lights when there's someone in the other lanes to
use the intersection. The flow's a bit different than in the U.S. When a light turns red the traffic
starts winding down much like with a yellow light in the U.S., and correspondingly when the light turns
green for the other direction at the same time, the traffic gradually starts going. At least, that's how
it usually works. On the other hand, most intersections only have one light at the spot where traffic is
supposed to stop, and there isn't a light on the other side. This means that the people stopped at the
front of the intersection where they actually do stop can't see the light. You have to either watch the
light in the other direction, or wait for people behind you to honk or start moving to know when it's
green. Sometimes a few people get jumpy and start going early, and that starts everyone else going
before the traffic in the other direction has even received the red light.

The other thing to note is that a lot of what I said above is how it is, but
that doesn't mean it that's how it's supposed to be. For example, the police will happily pull you over
and ticket you for going the wrong way on a one-way street. In fact, in Saigon they have a few
"one-way-traps". These are streets that have two way traffic, except for one little half block
section. They'll sit there and just wait for someone to come through, and pull them over. When this
happens, you pull out 50,000 VND and you're on your way in minutes (more on corruption later)

The essential key to driving in Vietnam is what I call the Joey Rule (named after my brother in law),
which can be stated as: Never Show Weakness. When you're going through an uncontrolled
intersection, the person that stops is generally whoever has the least nerve. Theoretically, the first
person in the intersection should usually be the one that can go on through, but it doesn't always work
out that way. Frequently, there are two people that came in at about the same time, and it's just up to
them to decide who's going to stop and who keeps going. The rules that determine who does are subtle and
hard to predict.

In general, people will stop based on either who can stop and restart easiest, who will suffer the most
from a collision, or who's with the bigger group of other vehicles. For example, a cyclo doesn't stop
very well at all, so they frequently but not always hit an intersection and keep going through it
assuming that anyone coming will dodge, unless something that's even bigger or has even more trouble
stopping reliably is coming. All bikes and moto-bikes can stop and restart easier than a cyclo, or
bicycle, so these frequently stop for other vehicles. Schoolgirls on bicycles generally just start it
going and keep going without even bothering to look sideways. I seldom see them dodging, slowing down or
doing any other kind of evasive action.

People also try to just promote good traffic flow naturally. So for example, let's say 10 cycles are
heading for an intersection in one direction, and four or five in the other direction. Most of the time,
the five will slow down or stop to allow the ten to go on through, although they're also likely to just
merge into one big lot and have everyone keep going. When all else fails, the person that flinches first
is the one that stops.

Left turns are a bit intimidating. In general, you could wait until the end of time for a clear spot,
so you generally don't. To make a left turn, you look at the traffic coming. If it isn't a complete
solid mass of traffic, you just start working your way across it much like a pedestrian does. You just
stay on the bike and turn into the traffic flow, then work your way gradually over assuming that the
oncoming traffic will dodge around you. It's a bit nerve wracking, but it seems to work.

The horn on cars and moto-bikes is essential to the smooth operation of the traffic here. When I first
started riding around Vietnam, I found the horns to be somewhat annoying. That's mostly because I
brought my American perceptions about horn blowing with me. Once you understand that someone behind you
that's honking at you is planning to overtake you, and they're just being courteous and safety
conscious, then it doesn't seem as bad. People aren't expected to look behind them, so the horn is a
warning that something is coming. It's still slightly annoying, but better than getting your ass run
over, and I frequently found I wished I had a horn on my bicycle instead of the pansy-assed little bell
I have. I frequently was going faster than any other bikes, and would like to have been able to warn the
people in front of me.

So far, the worst problem I usually have is that people see a big white guy on
a funny bicycle, and assume that I don't know how to drive in Vietnam. This makes pedestrians and other
vehicles stop or dodge when they would ordinarily keep going. This throws my timing off because I'm
driving assuming they know how things work here, and that makes for a collision course when I aim for
the spot they should be vacating, and they stop. I've taken to talking to myself, and my favorite
expression is "Dude!! Don't Panic!!". Of course, they can't hear me and wouldn't understand if
they did, but I find it somewhat satisfying... or neurotic. I'm not sure which.

So all in all, Vietnam traffic was intimidating when I first started, particularly since I wasn't all that
confident that I could handle my bike in an emergency. My first real panic stop was funny as can be because I
applied the front break a lot too much. The bike dutifully stood up on it's nose, or at least felt like
it was. In reality, I don't think the back tire actually left the ground and all I did was compress the shock,
but it was funny and made the locals laugh even harder than usual. In the end though, it wasn't nearly as bad
or intimidating as I thought it would be, and if you come to Vietnam I'd suggest you just quit whining and
start riding. It is better to start in Hanoi than in Saigon, and somewhere in the middle like Dalat or Hue
would be better yet. Any of these are quite workable for anyone with a modicum of skill and nerve. Just watch
the traffic on foot for a few hours before you ride in it, and don't start on a busy street or during rush
hour.

As you can tell, I've concentrated mostly on the traffic from a cycling perspective, but it also bears
mentioning that walking here involves a certain amount of nerve. Sidewalks are used almost exclusively for
commerce, work areas, or parking scooters. What they aren't used for much is walking. If you want to get
anywhere, you pretty much have to walk along the edge of the street and just not get all excited about cars,
scooters and cyclos whizzing by you. Crossing the street also requires some nerve. In Cairo and Bangkok, I
found that if you were just patient you could get a clear spot in traffic after a short wait. In any busy part
of Vietnam you would want a long time for that. With that in mind, you eventually just have to start crossing
in the middle of traffic. Basically, you just start walking slowly across the street in the middle of traffic.
You watch the vehicles to make sure they'll dodge around you, but you do have to assume that they will in most
cases. You also can't ever really get a clear shot all the way across a busy road, so you have to watch one
direction and wander over into the middle of the road while watching the vehicles coming at you, and then turn
your head and watch the other direction as you cross the rest of it. Of course, that doesn't always work
because other vehicles frequently cut corners or drive the wrong way or whatever else it takes.

The second funniest part of the traffic is that I'm so accustomed to it now I act like a local. If you
remember my chapter on Egypt, I stood and stared in awe at a girl that was crossing the Fifth of July Bridge.
Now I routinely do things just like that and think nothing of it.

The absolutely funniest part of it is that I'm writing this in Brisbane, Australia. The traffic here is
very orderly and efficient. Almost nobody jaywalks, or even thinks about speeding or running a light. However,
I find the traffic here scares me much more than the traffic in Vietnam. I feel more nervous crossing a street
here on foot, with the light and no cars in sight than I did crossing a busy street with moto-bikes whizzing
by on all sides in Saigon. This is mostly because they drive on the left side of the road here so cars keep
coming at me from the wrong place, and partly because the cars are big and fast and I'm not used to it. It's
irrational but it's the way it is.

The Old Quarter - Vietnamese Merchants

During my first week of wandering around I was quite surprised to find that I almost always ended up in
some kind of market area. Later, I figured out why. The entire country is a market area. Nearly everyone I ran
into has something that they're selling out of the front of their houses. Even people that have some other
kind of job will put a glass counter in the front of their house and sell whatever seems to be the item of the
day. My old impression of communism was that it was this giant centrally planned conglomeration that didn't
leave any room for commerce or business of any kind. This is absolutely not true here, and in fact this is the
most commerce dense place I've ever visited. There are residential areas that don't follow this pattern,
particularly the more wealthy areas but most of the areas I happened to run into definitely fit the bill.

My hotel was directly adjacent to the Old Quarter. This has been an artisan and craftsman center
continuously for 600 years. This is particularly impressive, since the communists technically didn't allow
trade for 20 years after the American War. Here you'll find people hammering relatively nice silver works
using the sidewalk as an anvil. I saw some absolutely beautiful silk outfits there, as well as baskets,
lacquer-ware and some other good artisan type things. You will also find just about any imaginable commodity
that's available in Vietnam (unfortunately, a cycle helmet does not fit into that category). This area is one
of the major tourist attractions in Hanoi, and I highly recommend it. The nice thing is that even though it's
a big tourist attraction, you don't run into all that many of them.

It took me a while to figure it out, but essentially everywhere in Hanoi looks very similar, so describing
the old quarter will come very close to describing the whole city. Of course, this is an oversimplification,
but not as much of one as you would think.

The typical shop in the quarter seems to have about as much space out front as a
bedroom in a typical U.S. house. The shop front is usually about 2-3 meters (6-10 feet) wide, and goes back
3-4 meters (10-15 feet). Most of the shop owners also live in their shop. For an owner with a very nice shop,
they'll live either upstairs or in the back, but lots of people have a mattress folded up somewhere in the
back, and they sleep on the shop floor at night. There is always one shop room that's directly on the
sidewalk. This will have most of the stuff that's for sale in plain view. Some people will have a couch and
other living accommodations in the back of this room, while others will just have the stuff in another room.
The mix of products is both very eclectic and frustratingly similar at the same time. I know that last
sentence contradicts itself, so I'll expand on it.

Picture this... You walk by a store that's selling used crankshafts, cylinder heads and various other
auto or scooter parts. In front of that is someone selling raw beef. She has about 30 pounds altogether,
and it's sitting in pans on the sidewalk. Next you see someone selling dishes, jewelry and lottery
tickets. In between, you saw someone walking along with the ubiquitous two baskets over the shoulders,
selling oranges or mangos, or a simple cooked meal. Next you see a shop selling cell phones, toothpaste
and Japanese audio products. You've now walked about 20 feet. That's what I mean by the
"eclectic" part of the sentence. You'll also see very weird combinations of products in the
same store. It's not at all uncommon to see someone selling diapers and cell phones.

The other side of the coin is that shops tend to band together in an area where every shop will be
selling the same thing. By this, I don't mean they'll be selling the same kind of stuff. I mean exactly
the same thing. So let's say you want some kind of office supplies. You'll go down to a street that has
twenty shops selling office supplies, and every shop will have exactly the same inventory as the shop
directly next to it. It took me three days of stopping at various office supply stores to finally find
one that could sell me a short pen that would fit in a fanny pack.

Part of this is historical. The Old quarter used to consist of a set of craft halls, very similar to the
guilds that existed in Europe a few hundred years ago. So for example, the basked makers guild would have a
guild hall where the artisans worked, and then a bunch of shops along the street to sell their output. In
fact, a lot of the street names in the quarter are basically just the names of the products that were sold on
that street. The correlation isn't all that strong any more, but it's still there. This set up a tradition of
having a bunch of competing merchants selling the same things, and it has kept up to this day.

So all in all, Vietnam seems to an outside observer to be a country of merchants. Even for people that do
some other kind of work, if they live on any street that has potential customers they almost always have some
kind of counter out front where they're selling something. Sometimes it's just a small counter with soap and
toothpaste and stuff like that, that the kids sell during the day to bring in a few extra Dong for the family.
Sometimes it's a the family's main source of income. But on every street I ever traveled in Vietnam, a very
large percentage of the houses were selling something out front. Of course, there is lots of housing that's
tucked into alleyways or other places without any storefronts, so it isn't like everyone is selling something,
but most of the places you're likely to see as a tourist are like that.

Trying to shop for specific things in Vietnam frequently turns into a funny story, so I'll throw out a few.

On one of my first days in the quarter, I found what I would call the "Hardware Section". This is
a whole street full of little stores that sell nuts, bolts, fasteners and the like. I didn't have my GPS with
me, so I couldn't mark the location, so I just looked carefully at the street and assumed since it was within 4
blocks of the hotel, I would be able to find it again. It turned out that I needed a long screw to
properly mount my cycle computer, since it apparently wasn't made with an eye to serving the huge recumbent
bike market. I then proceeded to look for that hardware section for over a week. Now mind you, I wasn't
looking all day every day, but I was riding around the quarter and enjoying the ride, while also looking for
it. The quarter is a very small area, with lots of twisting and turning streets, which is very easy to get
lost in or get completely turned around even if you are carrying a compass on your watch. One day
I got tired of looking, so I asked a cyclo driver to take me to the area, and he proceeded to ride forward one
block, right one block, and right again and there we were. Eventually, I figured out I hadn't been able to
find it because I'd been looking for the three days after Tet when the quarter turned into a ghost town.
Everything identifiable about the quarter, such as a prominent Stanley sign were taken down, so the
area looked just like everywhere else.

In a similar vein, I spent a few days looking for some bungee cords to tie my sleeping bag onto the bike.
When I finally admitted defeat, I asked the doorman at the hotel to help me. I then jumped on the back of his
moto-bike and we proceeded to go to a set of shops right on the other side of the street, that I rode by every
single day. At the third shop we stopped at, they produced the bungee cords no-muss, no-fuss

In Saigon, it was even worse. I wanted some cable ties to re-arrange the brake cables on the bike. I had
looked for days for those in Hanoi and finally gave up. I was looking in a huge market area near the hotel
that was loaded with hardware, but drew a complete blank. I finally talked to a guy that spoke English and
drew a picture for him of what I wanted. He went off for about five minutes and came back with a bag of
exactly what I wanted. The very next day, I found the store he had gotten them from, and it turned out I had
walked by the display four times.

Of course, these stories just demonstrate what a bad shopper I am, not anything particularly Vietnamese.
I'd probably have the same experience in Orchard Supply back home<g>

Another amusing shopping incident happened on my second day in Hanoi. A shop on the island in Ho Hoan Kim
Lake had some nice wood lacquered panels that I really liked. There were four to choose from. I had enough VND
in my wallet to buy just one, so I spent ten minutes trying to decide between two of them to see which one I
wanted. I agonized over it forever, then finally made a decision and pointed it out. The clerk pulled all four
panels off the wall and wrapped them up nicely, all ready for shipping.

Vietnamese Food

I ate Vietnamese food fairly regularly back in California, so some of the stuff I ate wasn't a huge
surprise. All in all, I'd rate Vietnamese food very good, and on par with Thai food. Like Thai food, it's all
much healthier than what Americans eat, and overweight people are exceedingly rare in North Vietnam, and not
all that common in Saigon.

The first day I had Vietnamese Porridge, and Vietnamese Coffee for breakfast. The porridge is difficult to
describe. Let's start with appearance. It looks like oatmeal, where you put in about three times too much
water, and didn't boil it off. The material is rice based instead of oat based. Let's say you wanted to make
Oatmeal Soup. Then you decide to throw some green onions and other assorted green bits, and a little meat or
chicken. The results are something like a cross between oatmeal and Pho (if you haven't eaten Pho, you
should). If you were sitting around thinking, "My oatmeal is kind of boring, let's add some peppers and
onions to it, and while you're at it, mix in last night's soup", then you're on the right track.

Coffee is grown all over the place in the Central Highlands. Vietnam is a major Coffee exporter (one of the
biggest in Asia). Now that's all well and good, except that most but not all of the coffee I had in Vietnam
wasn't very good. When it's made right, and I get the right beans it's quite good, but most of the time
neither of these conditions seems to apply. The other thing I really don't like about Vietnamese coffee is
that they make frequent use of a French invention where the coffee grounds and water are placed in a metal pot
on top of the glass or cup. It's brought to the table this way, and the water percolates down through and
makes the coffee in real time. Unfortunately, this works better in theory than in practice, so most of the
time you end up sitting for 10 minutes waiting for the water to drip down through, and then get a crappy cup
of coffee on top of it. It's frustrating when you know that they do have good coffee, and you can't get any.

Pho is one of the traditional staples of the Vietnamese diet, and I ate quite a bit of it. It's made
from rice noodles, that are a bit smaller than the noodles you would get in spaghetti. These are boiled
with a kind of soup stock that's usually been cooking from the wee hours of the morning, that includes green
onions, some broth, a few other vegetables and who knows what else. When a customer comes in, the cook
will take the noodles which are stored in a big ball in the kitchen, and mix it with the soup stock in a small
wire basket. While that's going on, the cook will chop up some beef or chicken into small pieces, quickly fry
it, and add that to the mix. When it's done, the basket comes out and the Pho goes into a bowel, along with a
sufficient amount of stock and meat. On the table, you eat it with chopsticks in one hand, and a soup spoon in
the other hand for the juice. You can of course add seasoning as well. You almost always get some sliced
orange peppers that are somewhat hot, but not blistering. Of course, I probably should mention that I describe
jalapenos as a mild pepper, so you should calibrate the heat level accordingly. The peppers you get are about
the same heat as a jalapeno, but without the distinctive jalapeno flavor. The flavor is closer to a Serrano
pepper, but they're hotter. You'll also get small limes, which are called Chanh (pronounced Chang)
in Vietnamese, and it's a good idea to squeeze them over the Pho. There's usually a bottle of red hot sauce on
the table, which is not bad but a bit too sweet for my taste (about as sweet as Tobasco). There will be some
greens cooked into the Pho (Bamboo shoots, etc). Some Pho places will also add some other items. For example,
ground peanuts are a common and good addition.

Correction: A Vietnamese reader pointed out that this is not quite correct. What I
said is a common misperception among visitors and guidebooks. Pho is only used to name the hearted beef
soup (originated from North). The soups I mentioned have a bunch of names that can't be printed without
the Vietnamese character set. They are cooked differently in towns or cities across the country and
therefore, it may have different name depend on where it comes from or what it's cooked with. Pho is
very distinct name for itself. That may explain why people kept looking at me funny when I pointed at
the soup and calling it Pho or Pha (as my Vietnamese friends called it). I went out for Pho with my
friends lots of times, but I think I was always getting the beef variety.

One common part of both Vietnamese and Thai cooking is the use of leaves. Pho will frequently come with
mint leaves, and/or some other kind of tree leaves (I don't know what they are). You break some of these up,
and eat them with the meal. I'm not really wild about the leaves, but I've gotten used to them and have
decided to keep trying them a bit to see if I develop a taste for them. Marcel eats the leaves faster than a
Koala bear would.

One very nice part of going on the organized tour was that with Marcel and Leah along, I saw some things I
would never have picked up on without them. Leah organized all the meals, and tried to have at least one thing
in each meal that we hadn't had before. She would also explain how the Vietnamese eat each item, and Marcel
added some tricks that may be Thai or Vietnamese. That's the nice thing about traveling with a group. Now, I'm
firmly convinced you shouldn't just get with a bunch of tourists and go "tour" somewhere, because
you won't come anywhere close to learning anything about the real place, but doing part of your trip with a
group is a good way to work it. Another good idea is to simply hire a local guide. The quality of the guides
varies all over the place, but you can usually get a pretty competent one to show you around and explain
things to you for a reasonable price.

My favorite drink I picked up on here in Vietnam is called a "Soda Chang". Chang is the
Vietnamese word for Lime. They don't know the difference between a lemon and a lime, so most Vietnamese will
call it Lemon if they speak English, or Limon if they speak French. The drink is sort of like a do-it-yourself
7-up, but better. You basically take plain soda (Club Soda), squeeze in some lime, and add some sugar. In
Vietnam, they have liquid sugar that mixes well with cold water. However, you won't find that anywhere else so
you have to get granulated sugar and stir like mad for quite a while and you never actually get all of the
sugar mixed in. For the lime, you can use about a tablespoon of concentrated lime juice, or squeeze the juice
from about half of a medium sized lime.

Vietnamese meals tend to have small portions of meat, along with bigger portions of rice or vegetable based
items. This is partly because of a long history of shortages of meat, and partly just because that's how they
eat. You'll very frequently end up with a small portion of thinly sliced meat, fish, squid or something else
along with rice or noodles. Most of this region's economy is based on rice (where most of the U.S. is based on
wheat and corn), so you'll find rice in one form or another in most meals. Steamed rice is very common, as are
several varieties of rice noodles. The meat is an adjunct to the meal instead of the huge main course. Most
meals also include some kind of vegetables and/or seaweed. The typical Vietnamese meal is therefore a bit
better balanced than the typical U.S. meal, and is also a lot lower in fat. The locals frequently pour some
kind of soup over the rice, which I don't really care for all that much.

They also have a lot of fish and other seafood. There's nowhere in Vietnam that's farther than 340 miles
from the coast, and most of the population lives within 50 miles so this isn't all that surprising. Of all the
fish I tried, the best was something I couldn't quite get the name of. It's a specialty of the North, as it's
a fish that only lives in the boundary region between fresh and salt water in the delta of the Red River. It
was most excellent, and probably the best fish I've ever had. I also had some particularly good fish in the
Mekong Delta region (near Saigon).

Marcel showed us a Vietnamese tradition that's a nice addition to any meal that has small slices of meat.
Take a small dish about the size of the soy sauce dish you get in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant. In that,
put equal amounts of salt and pepper (about 1/4 teaspoon for 1 person). Then take about half a lime, and
squeeze the juice over the dish. You want just enough juice to end up with all of the salt and pepper being
wet, without a lot of juice left over. Take the end of your chopsticks and mix the whole thing together. Then
take the meat in the chopsticks, and dip it in the sauce. It's quite good, so do try this at home.

Speaking of chopsticks, one of the good things about spending a couple of months in Asia is that you get
much more skilled at their use. I use chopsticks pretty frequently for an American, but they have always taken
an act of will to make them do what I want to. Now, I use them automatically and efficiently, and I find for
most of the things I eat here, they work better than a knife and fork would. I believe I'll use them
more frequently at home after this trip. The most amusing chopstick trick I've picked up is eating peanuts
with chopsticks. It's fun and a good test to determine if you're ready for the big time in chopstick use. The
other huge advantage of this method for someone like me is that it slows my normal consumption rate from wolf
mode down to something a bit more reasonable. While we're on the subject of peanuts, they do grow a lot of
them here and the vast majority of the ones I've had have been very good.

The most interesting phenomena I've experienced in Vietnamese dieting is that I've eaten birds in nearly
every stage. In Hanoi, I had something I dubbed "chicken guts mix". The main part consisted of round
balls that are chicken eggs that are in the process of being formed. The shell hasn't formed yet, and the
center doesn't really seem to be separated into yolk and whites. It was pretty good. This is served with
whatever else the butcher seemed to find on the way in, including chicken hearts and a couple of other
unidentified organs. The chicken hearts were very good, and the others were so-so.

The next obvious stage is eggs, which are very frequently served for breakfast both to locals and tourists.
The eggs are generally prepared just like they would be in the west, and are usually served with a French
style baguette of bread. The bread is very good, and better on average than the baguettes I got in France. One
new thing I picked up here is adding soy sauce to fried eggs. That's pretty good, but dispense with the salt
since soy sauce is loaded with salt.

The next stage was eating some sea birds that appear to be about a week or two old (or maybe they were just
small birds). The bird is about the size of your palm. Eating style seems to be mostly a matter of preference.
Marcel ate the whole thing bones and all, except for the beak and part of the head. Others picked off what
meat they could find, which is a lot like eating crabs (a lot of work for not much benefit). In the end, I
chose a course somewhere in between.

Several times we had duck prepared one way or another. I've generally disliked duck in the past, because it
always tasted greasy. Here though, they seem to have surrounded this problem and I generally liked it a lot. I
don't know if the ducks are raised differently than they are in other places, or if it's cooked differently
but it's excellent.

There's lots of good produce here in Vietnam. My favorites are mangos and pineapple. I realize these aren't
particularly exotic, but you have to learn to deal with disappointment.

Pineapple both here and in Thailand is excellent and fresh. To procure fresh pineapple, simply start down
any street at random, going in any direction at random. Before you travel one km, you'll probably see someone
selling it from a little traveling cart. You can buy half a pineapple, that's had the shell trimmed off, and
the center trimmed for a very reasonable price. If you get a vendor that's in a "gouge the tourist"
mode, it costs a whopping 10,000 VND (US$ .66). About half the vendors charge the Vietnamese price of
2,000 VND (US$ .13), so I give them 10,000 anyway for being honest. The price is about the same as in
Thailand. Pineapple is frequently served here with a mixture of salt and chili. Now by chili, I mean something
that's not the same as chili powder in the U.S., which includes Cumin. Here, it's closer to cayenne pepper
than to chili powder, and it has something else in it but I don't know what. I think you can use cayenne to
try it at home. It sounds a bit weird, but until you try it I don't want to hear any whining. The funniest
part of my addiction to pineapple is that when I got married in 1981, I made my wife make a separate wedding
cake just for me because she wanted pineapple in the main cake, and I hated pineapple. I guess I was young and
foolish then.

Mangos are very good here, and I think a bit better than the ones we get in California, which I'd guess are
usually from Mexico. A large one weighs about 1 kg, and costs 10,000 VND (US$ .66) / kg. One thing that
they do here with mangos that I'm not all that wild about is putting green mangos in some kinds of salads.
It's not terrible, but not something I'd eat every day.

Another interesting fruit is called Dragon Fruit. It's about the size of a softball, and it's purple on the
outside. The inside is all white, with some black specks floating around. The black specs are the seeds, and
they're distributed uniformly through the fruit instead of being concentrated in the center as is usual. The
specs look about half the size of peppercorns. The fruit is somewhere between tart and sweet and bland. Now if
that doesn't sound wishy-washy, I don't know what does but it's the best I can do.

They grow a lot of sugarcane here, and I've had it in a couple of formats that are interesting. For lunch
on day we had raw sugarcane with meat wrapped around it. It looked a bit like a corn dog, except the meat was
on the outside. You eat the meat off the outside, and then chew on the sugarcane. This was pretty good. You
also find little cafe like places along the side of the road that have a little sugarcane press. This is a set
of rollers spring loaded together with a handle to turn one of them. The vendor sticks a piece of raw
sugarcane in there, and turns the crank to move it through the press. This squeezes the juice out of the cane,
which is then placed in a cup of ice and you drink it straight. This is pretty good, but not something I'd
want on a regular basis.

In a restaurant in Hanoi, we had the biggest Escargot I've ever seen. The shells are about the size of a
golf ball. They apparently scooped the insides out, chopped them up, and added some more stuff, although I
have no idea what, and stuffed it back in. They didn't have the usual pile of butter and garlic that you'd
find in the French version (Escargot is generally considered a delivery vehicle for butter and garlic). It was
pretty good, but tough and chewy.

Asian cooking tends to have a lot more varieties of green vegetables than you find in western cooking. A
fairly substantial percentage of the meals included lemon grass, bamboo shoots or various kinds of seaweed
like substances. I wasn't really very wild about these at first, but they grow on you as you eat more of it.
On the other side of the variety fence, there is an awful lot of rice in the diet in one form or another and
one can easily get pretty tired of it over time.

Travel Tip

Always carry a small bottle of Cayenne Pepper with you. The most consistent thing I've found wrong
with meals on my trip is that many are too bland, and a bit of red pepper would fix that right up.
Red pepper is also the key ingredient to making bad airline food palatable. Surprisingly though, I've
ridden on five different airlines on this trip, and the food has been quite good on all of them.

Columbus In Hanoi

Over the next couple of weeks, I wandered all over the town, both on foot and on my bike. The old quarter I
described above was fairly typical. Some parts of the city were much less densely populated than others. Some
are newer and in better repair, but for the most part the construction was pretty similar. Parts of the
downtown area have modern skyscrapers and the like, although most of them are empty since the Asian economic
crash of the late 90s. I generally just wandered around at random, looked around, and talked to whoever I ran
into that spoke English. Most of the time I ate by stopping by a little restaurant on the sidewalk, or
whatever else looked appealing. My funniest meal was when I sat down at a little counter in the middle of the
quarter, ordered a meal using the Tourist's Point, and sat down on a little tiny stool to eat. I ended up
talking to a young Vietnamese guy beside me. After a while, he asked what I was doing and I told him I was
riding a bicycle around Vietnam. He asked "Are you the guy on that orange bicycle?". I also had some
people I met that wanted to meet up with me for dinner but couldn't remember my name. They just called the
hotel and asked for "the guy with the bike". That got them through immediately.

I refined my Columbus Style Navigation a bit more as well. To see a town now, I pick a compass heading and
head off in that direction. When I run into an obstruction, I turn in a random direction and either keep going
or try to get my heading back. That is of course unless I see something interesting I want to get a closer
look at, in which case all bets are off. I then keep going until I'm tired of it, and then use my GPS to
navigate back to the hotel. This is a great way to see a place, and I definitely ended up in some places I
wouldn't ordinarily see as a tourist.

Of course, it didn't always work out quite that way. The very first day that I got the bike going, I went
out for a "quick spin". Of course, since I was just going to go around the block, I didn't take my
map, GPS or the card with the Vietnamese name and address of the hotel. Naturally, I immediately found that
the block I was on wasn't square, and I soon became completely lost. I wasn't too worried, so I just kept
moving more or less in circles, assuming I'd eventually see something I recognized, or at worst I'd ask a
cyclo or taxi driver to show me how to get there. This was fun for about four hours, and then I started
thinking I wanted to get back. I did stop and ask a couple of cyclo and taxi drivers, but it turned out they
couldn't recognize the English name for the hotel, so after I finally satisfied their curiosity about the bike
I moved on. It took another two hours or so to eventually stumble on something I recognized. I wasn't all that
worried because I was having fun, but I was getting ready for a shower. Later on, I figured out that I'd been
within less than two blocks of the hotel four times in the last couple of hours, thus prompting the travel
tips I put in the Bangkok page. In fact, I had been on the other side of a distinctive round building that I
could see from the front door of the hotel.

I found a place I dubbed the "Hanoi Mobius Strip". One day, I decided to go East as far as I
could, and after navigating the usual hazards I ended up at a cafe where I sat down and had a nice drink with
a couple of Aussie guys on holiday. The next day, I went east for a few blocks and tried to go South as far as
I could. I ended up at the exact same cafe. A few days later, I went slightly East, and then tried to work my
way North, and ended up at the same cafe. By then I knew the way back to the hotel without the GPS or the map.

Hanoi Parks

Hanoi has several parks that are very nice. The nicest one I found was Lenin Park. This is one of the last
real monuments to that misguided philosopher that's left in the world. The park was very nice, with a large
lake in the middle. Hanoi has several lakes, and most of them have some kind of park around them. This was my
favorite, and there are several photos of it in the photo gallery. The most amusing thing about Lenin park is
that it charges an entrance fee. Since Lenin was supposed to be the great hero of the proletariat (workers),
it just seems funny that they charge an entry fee that a lot of the workers can't afford.

There was another lake named Ho Hoan Kiem (Lake of the Restored Sword), in the middle of the old quarter. A
Vietnamese legend that sounds a bit like Excalibur tells of how King Le Thai To received a magic sword that he
used during his ten year resistance against the Chinese Ming court in the 1400s. After liberating the country,
the king took a boat to the center of the lake to return the sword given to him by the Divine Tortoise. The
tortoise is said to have snatched the sword from his hand and disappeared into the lake. In the middle of the
lake is a small 18th century tower named Tortoise Tower. A large tortoise is said to still live there, and
sometimes people claim to see it.

The most amusing thing about this lake is that it was about 1 km from my hotel, and looking on a map it
jumped at you like you should be able to stumble on it with your eyes closed. Everywhere I wanted to go seemed
to involve going to the lake, and then moving on from there. This lake however became my arch nemesis of
navigation. The streets leading to it twist and turn a bit, and I ended up setting off to go to the lake
either on foot or by bike, and got lost more often than I actually found it. Even when I'd been there a couple
dozen times, I still got lost. I was completely pathetic in the navigation department. Maybe I'm taking this
whole Columbus thing too seriously.

Ho Chi Minh Museum

Ho Chi Minh is widely regarded to be one of the most influential communist leaders of the 20th century, and
he's unquestionably the chief architect of the strategy that ultimately got all foreign powers out of Vietnam.
He died in 1969 before the end of the war. He is the most obviously visible symbol of the communist regime,
and they make a real effort to revere him. I had a bit of trouble separating out what the average Vietnamese
on the street makes of him. If you just look at the visible signs, he's like our Lincoln, Jefferson and
Washington all rolled into one. You can find him on the money, and all kinds of monuments, but virtually
nothing for general Giap who is the second most prominent leader of the group. The government obviously wants
to keep a strong connection to his reputation, but most of the Vietnamese I talked to that had any opinion at
all were just tired of hearing about him all the time, or if they don't like the communist government they
actively hate him. One Vietnamese woman told me about a survey a Saigon newspaper reporter did that asked
people to list the person they admired most. Bill Gates came out number 1, and Ho Chi Minh was down around
number 10. Naturally, publishing this got the reporter in a whole raft of trouble with the communist
government, and I suspect he's in jail as we speak.

It's a bit tough to really get a grasp on HCM's history. There have been lots of things written about him,
but most of the history I've seen about his early life are pretty suspect. A large percentage of the works
trace back directly or indirectly to a book claiming to be an interview with him, but it turns out the
interviewer was Ho himself. So that means most scholarship on the subject consists of Ho asking himself
questions, and then answering them. We know for certain that HCM had no philosiphical problem with fabricating
things, and it's fairly certain a lot of the earlier things are fabrications, but I don't know enough to say
which things are and which aren't. One thing is certain. Somewhere along the line he became a master
politician, negotiator and influential leader. Like all communist leaders, he was absolutely ruthless in
eliminating rivals or anyone in the organization that didn't follow the path he wanted to go. He was masterful
at playing the Soviet communists off against the Chinese communists, and using their mutual antagonism to get
aid from both.

The HCM Museum is a bizarre and weird place. I think the architects were trying their best to make a museum
that wasn't terminally dull. I have to admit that this is an admirable objective, considering how boring most
museums are, and the bizarre displays at least keep you awake and guessing.

They have the normal war memorabilia and such, as well as some very well designed sets showing the
transition from the old to the new. These are mixed in with pages from his early notebooks, and the usual
other kinds of trivia you would expect. Most of it is quite well done as far as museums go, and as usual most
of it makes frightfully dull photographs so you won't see a lot of them in the photo gallery.

So, you'll be cruising through the museum seeing the kind of things you expect, and something will pop up
completely out of left field that doesn't seem to make sense at all. For example, one display is supposed to
show his thought process. It's a big sculpture that's a cross between a cave he lived in for a while and
apparently gained some kind of enlightenment, and what they thought of as a human brain. It came out pretty
muddled to me.

Another was a large white plastic table, with some giant plastic fruit on it. There's no sign explaining
what it's supposed to be, and it's so baffling every guidebook feels compelled to mention it (including me,
apparently).

The building is also kind of weird shaped with walls that appear out of nowhere, and big empty spaces that
you can't get to. All in all, it was an interesting visit just because of the weirdness of it, and I did
actually learn a bit about HCM there, so all in all I'd say that the designers must have achieved their
objective.

HCM Mausoleum

This is a frighteningly weird display. You go into this building, and there's Uncle Ho himself laid out for
display. His body is reputedly treated using the Soviet technology that's used to keep Lenin so peppy looking.
No cameras are allowed, and they check you pretty thoroughly on the way in.

All in all, I found the experience a bit creepy. It's not because I'm bothered by dead people, but because
I found the spectacle of it to be strange. HCM himself said he did not want this. Just to be sure, he said explicitly
in writing that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes spread over Vietnam. Naturally, the communist
leaders didn't pay any attention to the personal wishes of the leader of the revolution, and did what he said
he didn't want. As usual, they justify the actions they took for their own political and power-grabbing moves
by saying "the people" needed the symbol. Of course, since they were building a huge mausoleum for
Ho while people in the provinces were starving to death, I'm a bit mystified about which particular people
they were talking about.

Religious Institutions

Vietnam has had a lot of influence from several religions along the way, and as usual a lot of the tourist
attractions no matter where you go end up being religious in nature. There have been several major influences,
both on the northern Vietnamese people, and on the Southern people. For much of the history these were
different kingdoms with different religious institutions, different leaderships and different cultures. The
North always seems to swallow up the South sooner or later though, or at least that's the way it's been for
the last few thousand years.

All over Vietnam you can see the effects of this. Keep in mind that in earlier history, religious
institutions typically had much more influence on politics and policies than they do now. For example, the
Pope used to have his own army, which was used to actively wage war on behalf of the church. In very early
societies like the Egyptians, the religion and power structure were one and the same, and in fact that's still
somewhat true in Egypt and various countries, particularly in the Middle East.

Over the years, Vietnamese culture has been influenced directly or indirectly by many religions, including Buddhism,
Taoism, Confucianism,
Hinduism, Catholicism and a host of others.
The North tended to be influenced more by China and the South more by India. As you travel around, you will
see what's left of these influences. Some of these groups left more for future generations than others. For
example, the ones that built temples out of wood in a tropical climate didn't leave much of a mark for the
20th century.

The two tourist sites that really typify the two most influential religions in Hanoi are:

The One Pillar Pagoda is a wooden pagoda built on a single concrete pillar in 1049 under the Ly
Dynasty. The Ly dynasty was one of the more productive ones (I'll talk more about the dynastys in the
history page), and they made substantial progress for a couple hundred years. They improved the dike
system, improved the transportation system, improved communications and things generally improved during
the reign. The dynasty was greatly influenced by Buddhism, and they built over 200 temples around the
country. The One Pillar Pagoda is one of those. Naturally, since it was 1000 years old, the French felt
compelled to blow it up on their way out the door in 1954. It has since been rebuilt, and it's worth a
visit.

The Temple of Literature was founded about the same time to instruct students on Confucian ideals.
During the period after the Ly Dynasty, Buddhism and Confucianism were mixed and matched, with
Confucianism eventually winning out because the leaders found it to be an easier tool to control the
population with than Buddhism was. Confucianism advocates an absolutely stratified society, with
everyone in their place and no social mobility at all. Naturally, this sounds like a good idea if you
happen to be in a place at the top of the heap. The temple of learning still remains from this time, and
it's worth a visit both to see the different architecture, and because it's just a nice place to visit.

These two sects have had the most influence on Vietnamese history and culture. Catholicism had a
significant impact in the 19th and 20th centuries as well, and in fact the Catholic church was engaged up to
it's eyeballs with the French invasion and takeover of Vietnam, as well as the Diem puppet regime installed by
the U.S. after the French were kicked out.

Than Long Water Puppet Theatre

Water puppets are mechanically activated puppets that perform a play complete with music in a small pool of
water. The cool thing about them is that they are activated by bamboo poles from underwater, so you never see
the puppeteers or any of the mechanisms. It's an ancient art form that has changed little in the last thousand
years. They typically perform a play that consists of 12 acts generated from Vietnamese mythology accompanied
by music. The puppeteers have to be a bit tough, because some of the puppets weigh as much as 45 pounds (20
kg). It's an entertaining and uniquely Vietnamese art form that you shouldn't miss.

Ha Long Bay

I took a two day trip from Hanoi to Ha Long Bay, which is absolutely fabulous. As is to be expected, my
poorly organized and muddled brain forgot that there was a Ha Long Bay trip as part of my tour with Marcel's
group, so I went on my own. It worked out just as well anyway, because the trip was very inexpensive (25 USD
for a ride out there, a night in a hotel and the ride back including meals), and I met some really nice people
along the way.

Ha Long Bay is a United Nations World Heritage listed site, and one of the most beautiful places in
Vietnam. The bay consists of thousands of rocky islands popping up out of the bay. Many of the islands have
very large limestone caverns, and we toured a couple of them. The caverns look a lot like the caverns I've
been to in California, but they're generally a bit bigger inside. On the two days I was there the weather
wasn't quite as cooperative as one would hope, but it was still a great trip.

The bay is hauntingly beautiful, and has it's share of colorful stories and myths associated with it. Ha
Long means "Dragon Descending", and there are a couple of variations on the legend about the
creation of the bay. The most common is that a celestial dragon and her offspring were ordered by the Jade
Emperor to halt an invasion from the sea. She spewed out bits of jade that turned into wondrous island and
karst formations, thereby scuppering the enemy ships. Other variations have the islands as pearls, and the
dragon creating the bay by swishing her tail, thus tearing up parts of the mainland that were filled by the
sea. In either case, the dragon is said to have liked the creation so much that she settled among them and
lives there to this day.

The bay has been the site of several historical sea battles. It is said the caves here was used to store a
bunch of bamboo spears that General Tran Hung Dao planted in Song Bach Dang to stop Kubalai Kahn's invasion
after Mongolia swallowed up the rest of China.

On the trip out to the bay, I met a couple of people that I really liked. That's the best part about going
on organized tours. Sure, you're being a tourist but you get to meet some great people that way.

Mindy and Emily are a couple of young women that are teaching English in Ho Chi Minh City for a year
between high school and university. I think this was an excellent idea. I used to think it was best for a high
school student to just get on with it and go to university, because I staunchly believe a university education
is the best thing that they can do for themselves. Skipping a year tends to lead to entanglements such as
cars, jobs, loans, relationships and a whole host of other things that can disrupt the educational process.
After meeting Mindy and Emily plus a few others like them along the way, I've decided that it's an even better
idea get out and see how the rest of the world lives and thinks, and to expand your horizons before going off
to school. In a lot of places, you can get by for very little money by teaching English or doing other odd
jobs. Both of these young women managed to see a lot of Vietnam without spending very much at all. Later in
Saigon I also met several young people that are on a "Semester At Sea" program. In this case, they
took one semester during their third or fourth year of university to sail around the world on a cruise ship,
and spend a bit of time in each of a dozen or so countries. This also seems like a good but different
experience.

Walter & Anne are a couple from Norway that took six months off to travel together. Their children are
all grown, and they both have careers going full bore but decided to do this together. It took a while to get
it all worked out, but in the end they're doing the same thing I'm doing, but doing it together.
The Ozzies would have to say "Good on ya, Mate". I spent lots of time talking to them, and they
pointed out the best places to visit in New Zealand.

Yukari is a Japanese woman that got "downsized" as they say. The Japanese economy has been in a
slump for some time, and that seems to be a fairly common occurrence. She naturally did the right thing by
burning through her unemployment while going off to travel for a few months in Vietnam and New Zealand. I've
met a surprising number of people along the way just like that. Most people panic when they lose a job and go
on the hunt for a new one as soon as they can. Other's just chill out and enjoy life with the assumption that
a job will be available when they need it. The latter approach makes a lot more sense to me.

I met and talked to a few more people on the trip, and all in all it was a very pleasant trip with nice
people and great scenery. I'd place Ha Long Bay on the must see list if you go to Vietnam at all.